Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 1043 frames media bias as a "Chinese virus," mocking Biden’s incoherence while exposing CBS/NBC’s censorship of Taiwan, COVID-19 lab-leak debates, and Cuomo’s #MeToo hypocrisy amid 15,000 nursing home deaths. He ties corporate globalism to elite protection—like Disney’s Uyghur silence—while critiquing identity politics through Total Recall’s memory-implantation themes, contrasting it with Christian views on free will. Guest Clifford May warns U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan revived Al-Qaeda, advocating a 2,500-troop counterterrorism force, before the host pivots to Matthew 5:28, rejecting ascetic lust interpretations as joyless. The episode ends by defending Huckleberry Finn’s racial realism while urging listeners to heal from family trauma through therapy and mentorship. [Automatically generated summary]
Suspension Of Law And Fiscal Redistribution00:02:59
Due to a dangerous surge in nonsensical COVID stories in corporate journalistic outlets, President and venal house plant Joe Biden has announced he will suspend the rule of law and take everyone's money away and give it to people he likes.
Speaking to a fishbowl that reminded him of that adorable Disney movie with the fish called What's Her Name, who was played by that actress someone or other and kept forgetting something, or maybe that was a different picture, Biden said, quote, We all must come together in believing that this terrible increase in nonsensical news stories about COVID is the fault of someone other than myself.
Maybe we should blame that big orange-haired guy who used to run around scaring everyone while I was hiding in the basement.
Or possibly we should point the finger at that squinty fellow on the evil cable channel where they disagree with all the nice people.
Or maybe I'll accuse all the Americans who aren't as smart as I thought they were because they wouldn't do the irrational thing I told them to do when I told them to do it back when I remembered what it was.
In any case, whoever is to blame who isn't me, it's now their fault that I have to ignore the rule of law and take away everyone's money and spend it on infrastructure, like teaching little boys to wear dresses so Corey Booker won't feel bad about being homosexual anymore.
Or possibly I'm confusing Corey Booker with that gay guy who thinks he's Spartacus.
I'm not sure.
And look, folks, here's the deal.
I have completely forgotten what I was talking about, and that's not hyperbole, unquote.
Later at a press conference, White House press secretary Jen Pesaki refused to pesé if the scheme to shred the law and peseel Americans' salaries was strictly constitutional or just a lot of patoletarian crap.
Here's a transcript of the exchange with Washington Post White House correspondent Ashley Malfeasans.
Correspondent Malfeasans, quote, what is the president's favorite flavor of ice cream?
Unquote.
Spokeswoman Pesaki, quote, please, Ashley, you've got to get me out of here.
This place is a hellhole of incompetence and corruption.
They're letting COVID-drenched Mexicans cross the border in droves.
Inflation's through the roof.
The Constitution is in tatters.
And if I keep trying to blame Republicans for the high crime in Democrat cities, I'm going to be the laughing stock of the entire country, unquote.
Correspondent Malfeasans, quote, and how are the president's cute little dogs, unquote.
Spokeswoman Pesaki, quote, dead.
They're dead.
They didn't go away to a farm, Ashley.
They killed the dogs because they kept crapping on the White House rugs.
Please help me, unquote.
Ms. Pesaki added that until the ridiculous COVID news stories were brought under control, Americans should be forced to wear masks for no reason.
And to set an example, she herself would cover her own face with a fake smile as if she were telling the truth or at least making sense.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity-doo.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
Words Mean So Much00:12:41
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we are back laughing our way through the fall of the Republic, and this is my last show before my week-long vacation, so you will have two claviless weeks.
I expect the fall to be completed.
Please complete the fall of the Republic by the time I get back.
I just want to find rubble in your hands sticking up and maybe occasionally a staring face with some blood dripping down the center.
Also, that'll also give you an opportunity while I'm gone to go on Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show, give us a five-star review, whether you like it or not.
Just give us the five-star review.
It helps us.
It really does help us a lot if you will do that.
You can also go on YouTube and subscribe to the Andrew Clavin channel, my specific channel.
And if you leave a comment there and it is sufficiently bigoted and sexist and just it really has to be kind of morally repellent, then we'll include it on the show as being a perfect part of this commentary.
Today's comment is from philosopher Stoned, who says, between the Bible, rock auto and generic Viagra, Clavin continues to deliver women of high caliber right to my door.
Keep it up and I'll have more girlfriends than there are liberals in the establishment.
We do do door-to-door deliveries, especially if you hit that bell and you subscribe to YouTube.
You just open the door there and Barbara Eaton will be standing outside.
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If anybody comes to your door, just ask him.
And if he knows, call the police.
So now and again, I like to return to the...
There was a joke for people who are, what, 80 years old.
Now and again, I like to return to the mad scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet because it remarkably, almost miraculously, predicts 400 years in the future every stupid idea the left will have.
And there's a reason for this.
The Hamlet, in my view, is about the Reformation.
It's about Martin Luther going to Wittenberg, which is where Hamlet goes to university.
And Shakespeare understood that when the monopoly of spiritual truth was stolen, taken away from the Catholic Church, and when the church then shattered, he understood that ultimately this was going to mean the death of God.
And when God died in common philosophy, philosophy would go off in a certain way, that there would be a logical end to thinking illogically about the world, because when you're thinking about the world without God, you're thinking illogically.
So in this scene, Hamlet pretends to be mad to buy time while he investigates whether the king has killed his father.
And he starts talking about relativism.
He says there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
So without God, everything, all morality becomes relativistic.
He talks about subjectivity and how you cannot tell the difference between your mood and the state of the world.
Every time, that's the what a piece of work is man speech, where he talks about because he's depressed, the world has become an ugly place to live in, and he can't tell the difference between his feelings and the truth.
But today, I want to focus on just one exchange that happens between Polonius, the king's kind of old foolish advisor, who's trying to find out just how crazy Hamlet is.
And he sees Hamlet reading a book and he approaches him.
And just so you know, the word matter in this case, he says, what's the matter, which means what is the subject you're reading?
Here's the scene.
What do you read, my lord?
Words.
What is the matter, my lord?
Between who?
I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
Oh, slanders, sir.
The satirical rogue says here that old men have gray beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum tree gum.
They have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams.
All which, sir, I most powerfully and potently believe, though I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, that you, sir, shall grow old as I am if like a crab you could go backward.
Though this be madness, yet there's method in it.
There's method in Hamlet's madness.
When you ask him what he's reading, he says words, words, words, because the words are not attached to any meaning because there's no objective truth for them to be attached to because God is gone.
And therefore, it's slander to tell the truth, to tell unpleasant truths.
The guy is writing says that old men look old, they have gray hair, they have wrinkled faces, and he says, oh, I believe all that, but it's not honest to write it down.
And it does not sound like the left.
You know, you could say, you know, Ali Stuckey was knocked off Twitter today because, or yesterday because she said that the weightlifter in the Olympics, who was actually a man behaving as a woman, said he's still a man, so it's not fair for him to compete.
So they took her down because it's true, but it's not right to say it, just like what Hamlet is saying.
Now, this week, for instance, the American Medical Association, the Board of Trustees, this is the organization that represents doctors in America, they passed a resolution that will have the AMA lobbying to end the designation of sex in all future birth certificates, right?
It says, existing AMA policy recognizes that every individual has the right to determine their gender identity and sex designation on government documents.
And to protect individual privacy and to prevent discrimination, U.S. jurisdictions should remove sex designation on the birth certificate.
So remember the first thing they used to say to a mother was it's a boy or it's a girl?
No, no more.
They have to wait till they decide, till the actual person decides whether he or she is a boy or a girl.
Now, just to be clear, by the way, when you grow up in every state, but I think two states, if you grow up and decide that you're a girl, you can change your birth certificate.
So this is absolutely unnecessary and ridiculous.
But the whole thing is, the thing you have to understand about the entire transgender panic, okay, this is the important thing.
No one, no one believes that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man.
No one.
No one believes it.
Twitter, when they knock Ali Stuckey off, they don't believe it.
They don't believe she's wrong.
They believe that a man cannot become a woman and a woman cannot become a man.
What they are trying to do, they're talking about words, words, words.
They're trying to change the definition of the word man and the definition of the word woman so that it will mean what they say it means.
It doesn't change reality at all, right?
They're just changing the definition of words.
So many of these arguments are about words.
So why does messing with language always lead to tyranny?
Why does it always lead people to become tyrannical?
The answer is in Lewis Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, right?
Humpty Dumpty says to Alice, when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.
And Alice says the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.
And Humpty Dumpty replies, the question is, which is to be master?
That's all.
If words don't have the usage that grows up out of a common understanding of reality, something we all understand, we all understand what a man is, we all understand what a woman is, once you stop, take that away, once you take that definition away, it has no meaning.
It has no meaning.
It's just who will be master.
It is who will set the agenda of what words mean, because they're not changing reality.
They're just changing what we can say about reality, how we can discuss reality.
And the thesis behind this, of course, is that words have no connection to an objective reality because there is no objective reality.
And therefore, you know, progressive thought has basically progressed back to the old superstition that changing the name of something will change the essential essence of it.
And that's why they have to teach this to children.
I mean, you know, we're all, I think any sane, sensible human being is absolutely disgusted by the peddling of perversion to children, the drag queen story hours.
Today, this week, some British journalists suggested that we should start writing porn for children because it would teach them to have a not to be violent, not to look at violent porn.
But all porn leads to violence because porn is not about human beings.
It's just about sensation.
And like with any sensation, with any drug, anything that stimulates your brain, you need to stimulate it more and more so you go off into weirder and weirder stuff.
And it has to be more and more this kind of essence of what the body longs for without any humanity in it whatsoever.
They had this thing.
Really, I just find this absolutely depressingly sick, is they had transgender propaganda in the Muppet Babies, right?
And this is a trusted outlet, right?
Parents can trust when they put their kids in front of the Muppet Babies that they're going to be watching appropriate content.
Instead, they got the scene in which Gonzo becomes Gonzarella.
Everyone, there's something I need to tell you.
The princess who came to your ball tonight was me.
I'm Gonzarella.
Gonzo, why didn't Voo tell us?
Because you all expected me to look a certain way.
I don't want you to be upset with me, but I don't want to do things just because that's the way they've always been done either.
These guys, these guys should be just walking, you know, the left should at this point just be walking around on the street with those little raincoats so they can expose themselves to each other.
You know, the thing is, if it were true that changing words change reality, then this would be something that might be worth doing, right?
You might change reality and make it more fair, more just.
You might make people nicer.
You might take away their propensity for violence.
But because there is a reality, because there is a reality, words and words have a relation to that reality.
All they can do is shut you down.
You know, because since we're talking about sex, I have this funny story.
I've told this, I think, once before, but it is worth talking about.
When I moved to England, right, I lived in England for seven years.
The word for women's underwear, the American word for women's underwear, panties, is a word that men find sexy.
Ask them, they'll lie about it, but they all, everyone, every male, finds the word panties sexy.
Why?
Because it makes you think about women in their underwear, right?
It's a sexy word.
When I moved to England, the word for panties in England is knickers.
I would hear the word knickers.
All I would think about was the three Stooges playing golf.
There they are in their knickers.
And so the word knickers had no sexual feelings about it at all.
After I lived in England for a number of years, however, and got used to the English language, suddenly the word knickers became a sexy word, right?
Words are vessels of meaning and association.
And if you change the word, the meaning and association just fills up that word.
That's why you get what Steven Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill.
You call people slow and that becomes an insult, so you call them retarded.
And then that becomes an insult, becomes a synonym for stupid, right?
And then you change that and you call them special or gifted.
And then you have, you know, some clown like Barack Obama making jokes about the special Olympics because we all know what it means and the meaning follows the word around.
The left thinks it has the power to change reality, but all it has the power to do is to shut us up.
And all of this, all of this points to the fact that without a God, without objective reality, it all becomes a question of who will be master.
Conspiracy of Interests00:16:44
And what we're living in is this incredible moment when our elites, having failed at almost everything, our elites have forgotten that they are there to serve us, not to dominate us.
And they have started to think that their expertise, their brilliance, their genius is going to change the world as long as they can tell us what to think, what to do, and most especially, what we're allowed to say.
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Now, there's one word especially I want to talk about today because calling things by their names is really an important thing.
It's really important to call something by its name.
Nobody feels a hostility toward a man who feels he's a woman or has some gender dysphoria.
It's not a question of being compassionate.
It's not a question of being unkind.
It's a question of calling things by their name.
The word I want to talk about today is the word media or press or the phrase news outlet.
The idea that there is something, something in America where we go to get the news.
It seems to me that word is now out of date, that the American media is no longer the American media.
The American media has been transformed into something else.
And so when we discuss it, especially conservatives, because conservatives have a lot of problems with the news media and the entertainment media, but we have to know what it is we're describing, right?
We have to understand that we're not describing news anymore.
We're now describing the information arm of various multinational corporations with a huge, huge financial investment in unrestricted trade and globalism, right?
That's how they're going to make the most money.
And one of the places they're going to make that money from is China, right?
Because China just has a huge population.
It is a huge, huge market.
And they are run by an authoritarian, genocidal regime that torments and tortures its citizens, but allows them to make money, just does not allow them to question anything that the ruling Communist Party does.
And it's not even a Communist Party anymore.
It is just a boot stomping on the human face forever, as George Orwell said.
So just take a look at this for a minute, right?
We're talking about the news.
CBS news is part of Viacom CBS, and so is Paramount Pictures, which recently stripped the Taiwan tag off Tom Cruise's jacket in the Top Gun sequel so as not to offend China.
They don't want to offend that Chinese market.
This is a huge corporation with various media outlets, entertainment and news media outlets.
It is not somebody sitting down and telling you the news like an old-fashioned newspaper or even an old-fashioned television station would do.
NBC News is part of Comcast, which also owns Universal Pictures, which makes the Fast and Furious franchise.
And you remember how recently John Cena, who was in the Fast and Furious 9, had to say he was Han Han Han Han sorry for calling the country of Taiwan, or as we call it, Free China, a country so as not to offend China.
ABC News, part of Disney, they made Mulan at the end of Mulan.
They offered thanks to the Chinese bastards who were imprisoning and killing Uyghurs and re-educating Uyghur Muslims.
They also air Muppet Babies, right?
They also air Muppet Babies.
So globalism, China, the whole idea that the elites should be defining reality so that they are the one, so that their power, their profits, and their opinions will never be challenged.
How does that affect the news?
Why do I say that this is about the news media?
Well, here's a montage, which was compiled by Tucker Carlson, that shows how the media reacted last year when President Trump called the Chinese virus the Chinese virus.
The president referred to the coronavirus as a, quote, foreign virus.
And I think it's going to spack, it's going to come across to a lot of Americans as spacking of xenophobia.
Xenophobic wartime Trump.
Where he thinks the only path now is to basically declare the virus public enemy number one, paint it in somewhat racist terms.
The xenophobia and the racism and outbreak is such a common thing, and it is incredibly dangerous.
It is problematic, and it is scary.
And I just really want to call that out.
Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus?
Why do you keep using this?
A lot of people say it's racist.
It's not racist at all.
No, not at all.
It comes from China.
That's why.
So that montage was part of a major, major story that you were not going to hear on the news.
Tucker Carlson covered it, but also our friend Ashley Reinsberg, who we had him on the show.
He's the author of that book, The Gray Lady Winked, which he had to self-publish because nobody wanted to offend the New York Times.
Here's what Ashley Reinsberg wrote in an article at the site Unheard.
The article is called, Did the New York Times Stifle the Lab Leak Debate?
The subhead was, Were commercial relationships with China a factor?
He says, in the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment with anyone associated and anyone associated with smears as racist.
This is the theory that COVID was developed in the Wuhan lab in their studies of coronaviruses and was released into the air probably accidentally.
Here is another montage from Tucker about how this story was covered last year.
CDC Director Robert Redfield told our own Sanjay Gupta in a new CNN documentary that he believes COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan, even though obviously there has been no formal evidence to support the theory.
You know, the lab leak theory doesn't seem like a plausible theory unless you aggregate the biggest collection of coronaviruses and put them in a lab, the theory that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.
But tonight, Dr. Anthony Fauci tells National Geographic that, quote, this virus could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.
Both scientists and the U.S. intelligence community agree that this coronavirus was not man-made.
That is not a possibility.
It came from a natural source.
It didn't come from a lab.
A lot of people on the right love that phrase, escape from the lab, because it sounds like something from a Marvel movie or a comic book.
It sounds like they're talking about a man-made virus that China was weaponizing that got out of control.
Okay, so what was going on?
Here's Ashley Reinsberg again in Unheard.
He says, you know, a lot of the news is generated by the New York Times.
The New York Times sets the budget, even today sets the budget of most major outlets.
What I mean by that is they look at the budget is which stories are going to run where in the New York Times.
That budget is sent out over, you know, now I guess is sent out over computer, used to come over the old teletypes.
And people look at it and say, oh, that's an important story because it's going to be on the front page of the New York Times.
And that so it sets the budget of a lot of major outlets.
And Reinsberg says the Times was the source of a lot of this disinformation pro-China.
Why?
He says, Times opposed Trump's travel ban to and from China.
The Times opposed Trump's travel ban to and from China as isolationist.
Remember, that China ban probably saved a lot of lives.
It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China's arch enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus.
It downplayed China's economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the Chinese Communist Party story on the pandemic's origins.
And it celebrated China's success in battling COVID-19, taking the CCP's absurd mortality numbers at face value.
Okay, that's what the Times was doing.
And what's more, Dominic Green at The Spectator reports this.
He says, a top editor at the New York Times instructed Times staffers not to investigate the origins of COVID-19, according to two Times employees.
In early 2020, a veteran Times employee told Dominic Green at The Spectator, he said, I suggested to a senior editor at the paper that we investigate the origins of COVID-19.
I was told it was dangerous to run a piece about the origins of the coronavirus.
There was resistance to running anything that could suggest that COVID-19 was man-made or had leaked accidentally from a lab.
The New York Times, according to Ashley, also used zoologist Peter Dazik as a key source in many articles about the pandemic.
They allowed Peter Dazik to write an op-ed about how the pandemic was likely caused by deforestation and other ecological things.
They never identified the fact that Dazik is part of the EcoHealth Alliance, who are the guys who received that $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, $600,000 of which went to the Wuhan lab to fund the research into bats and coronaviruses.
That's what Rand Paul is always hectoring Tony Fauci about, because Fauci is part of the NIH, right?
So the New York Times acted incredibly unscrupulously.
Why?
The New York Times has begun publishing a very lucrative Chinese edition.
It's very lucrative by their own account.
They've received hundreds of thousands of dollars, ultimately into the millions, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, to run ads that looked like news stories but were actually Chinese propaganda.
Okay, they were receiving a lot of money.
Tucker Carlson says those ads have now vanished from the Times, which is really weird because the Times is supposed to be the paper of record.
They're supposed to keep all their stuff around.
So my point is that we on the right frequently talk about the anti-conservative bias in the media, but that's not what we're seeing.
It's not the media.
Its purpose is not to give us the news.
Its purpose is to serve the globalist ambitions and the Chinese market of the corporations who own these outlets.
We're seeing the news has moved from the news has become a sort of PR outlet for these people.
You know, in the Wall Street Journal this week, there was an editorial by Susan Wojitsky, who runs YouTube.
It was called Free Speech and Corporate Responsibility Can Coexist Online.
She says, YouTube is working to balance competing interests.
Government can set clear but flexible rules.
The stakes are high for updating our approach to online speech.
Over-regulation of legal content would have a chilling effect on speech and could rob us of the next big idea, a great discovery.
So she's saying, oh, we have so balanced, we're so thinking about this.
Here's the reality from Rand Paul.
Here's what happened to Rand Paul's cut three.
Recently I shared a video on my YouTube page.
It was an interview between myself and a journalist where we discussed a variety of topics, including the science behind wearing masks.
Apparently, because I dared to contradict Dr. Fauci and the government, YouTube has removed my video.
If you want to see the video, it's up on rumble.com.
Rumble.com does not censor the news.
YouTube said the video violated their policy because of my comments on masks and that they don't allow videos that contradict government's guidance on COVID.
YouTube may be a private entity, but they're acting like an arm of the government, censoring those who present an alternative view to the science deniers in Washington.
People like Dr. Fauci, who have lied to the American people time and time again about masks.
See, this is not a conspiracy.
It's what I call a conspiracy of interests.
People's interests are aligned, right?
We used to have a manufacturing economy.
A manufacturing economy is inherently conservative because things that you manufacture have to work.
They have to appeal to people.
You have to serve your customer base.
Now we have an information economy.
Information serves the customers by being pleasing to the customers.
The truth is not pleasing.
You don't get paid for telling people the truth.
We've lost audience on this show when I've come out and told you what I really thought about a situation.
And of course, since everything I say is 100% correct, it was the truth.
The truth is not the popular thing.
What you get paid for in an information economy is telling people what they want to hear and telling people what makes them feel righteous and telling people what makes them feel good.
So the economy is no longer aligned with conservative interests.
It's aligned with American, with leftist interests.
It's anti-American because it's pro-globalist.
It's anti-nationalist.
So any kind of patriotism is really against it.
So the left loves that as well.
And that's all the entertainment media, everything about it.
But most importantly, more importantly than anything else, it is geared toward top-down governance.
It is part of this incredible sense that has come over American elites especially, I think, that they are no longer here to serve us.
They are there to rule us.
And this is, remember, progressives are always progressing backwards.
They're always progressing back into the past.
They're progressing from the revolution, the American Revolution, back toward Pharaoh, right?
The only really new idea in politics is that each of us should run his or her own life.
That's the only new idea in politics.
What they're progressing to is back to Pharaoh.
You know, there was an amazing, amazing video of Corey, I think her last name is Bush.
Is that her last name?
She is a congresswoman from Missouri.
She is out to defund the police, but she is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on personal protection, just like every single movie star who is against guns, just like every single politician is against guns.
They are all surrounded by people with guns, but you're not supposed to be surrounded by people with guns.
I used to live in Hollywood right next to my next-door neighbor who was a major Hollywood star who was a major anti-gun proponent, would make speeches against guns, and all day long, men with guns were coming in and out of her house, and they called me at one point.
They called my wife and said, don't worry, we're watching your house too.
And I thought, that's good, but I have my own gun.
You know, that's why, you know, I can't afford to have those guys come out, but I can afford a gun.
Here's Corey Bush talking about why it's not hypocrisy for her to defund the police so you're not protected, but surround herself with private police paid for by us so she is protected.
I'm going to make sure I have security because I know I have had attempts on my life and I have too much work to do.
There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that.
So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend $10 more on it, you know what?
I get to be here to do the work.
So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.
We need to defund the police and put that money into social safety nets because we're trying to save lives.
She is so important that she has to stay alive.
Not you.
Yeah, you know, what are you doing?
Who the hell are you to stay alive, to want to protect yourself?
That's ridiculous.
That's ridiculous.
Who are you to want to go out to a restaurant?
Gavin Newsom has to go out to restaurants.
He has important meetings to take care of.
Lori Lighthouse has to get her hair done.
She has to look good.
You know, the mayor of Chicago has to look good.
That's an important person.
Phew, if you have a shaggy beard because they haven't let you out of your house for a year and a half, that's nothing.
That is nothing.
These are important people.
This is, again, it's not a conspiracy.
It's an alignment of interests.
Globalism, pro-China, the idea that you have no right to do anything but consume.
You have no right to your opinions.
You have no right to challenge their rule.
You only have the right to consume things and get things and have things be convenient.
It's the opposite of QAnon.
Governor Cuomo Resigns00:15:19
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To me, one of the most corrupt examples of the way the leadership class abuses us and manipulates us and filters information for its own purposes is the Me Too movement.
which I think at some point, at some point down the line outside of the media, is probably has actual women being actually abused, trying to get their stories out through the media.
But the media is always operating for its own political purposes.
And I was thinking about this, of course, as Andrew Cuomo's crimes finally started to come to light.
Cuomo, under pressure, let the AG, the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, investigate these charges against him that he routinely abuses women.
And let's remember how the press covered Cuomo when he seemed to be the anti-Trump, when Trump's COVID-19 press conferences were not going that well.
They were kind of alienating people because Trump was talking too much about himself instead of talking about the suffering of other people.
They chose Cuomo.
He had these very calm, very stately press conferences.
While he was responsible for the death of between 14 and 15,000 old people by forcing COVID patients into nursing homes, forcing nursing homes to take COVID patients so that the old people were dying like flies.
We all knew this in conservative media.
It's kind of a revelation to the left now that this was happening at the time because they were so busy worshiping Andrew Cuomo.
Here they are.
Here's a montage of them talking about.
David, we're sitting by for Governor Cuomo's press conference, his daily briefing.
How would you contrast Cuomo and President Trump's handling of the crisis?
Truth versus mendacity.
Governor Cuomo, out there day after day after day, everything Trump isn't.
Honest, direct, brave.
Real leadership of the kind the President of the United States should have provided.
Governor Cuomo is clearly living in a totally different reality, the actual one, than the president of the United States.
Governor Cuomo has become a national leader.
For a lot of people, Andrew Cuomo has become the leader of the Democratic Party.
He is conveying incredible strength.
You spoke to National Guard troops today in a stirring speech that if I wasn't listening carefully, I thought you were sending soldiers off to war.
This has been a remarkable show of leadership by Governor Cuomo in recent days.
He's providing hope, but not false hope.
Governor Cuomo, I think, is one of the heroes on the front lines.
With all of this adulation that you're getting for doing your job, are you thinking about running for president?
So, you know, they did this with Michael Avenatti, too, right, who's now behind bars.
And you would think at some point, after they've done this a number of times, now they're doing this with this crumbling, dementia-ridden president that we have, the same kind of thing.
You know, what's your favorite ice cream, Mr. President?
You'd think at some point, if they were really a news media, they would say, huh, you know, we keep making these mistakes about people's character.
Maybe we should take a look at some of the people we don't like and see if we were wrong.
Maybe we should take another look at Donald Trump and see, was he as bad as we thought he was?
But that's not what's happening, right?
We're not actually dealing with a biased news media.
We're dealing with corporations operating with a certain interest in mind.
They don't have to corrupt every single one of their journalists.
Every single one of their journals don't have to be corrupt.
They simply have to get rid of anybody who crosses the line so that the rest of the people know what's going on.
Like at the New York Times, they fire you if you let an op-ed get by that says something that the woke people don't like, not because they're woke, but because they're a corporation with global interests.
That's why.
That is why that's happening.
And so when you look at Cuomo getting caught, now all these women come forward and they say, you know, Cuomo grabs them, he, you know, touches them, he makes, he makes remarks, ugly remarks.
Under pressure, Andrew Cuomo turns this over to the Attorney General, but then he starts to hear that the Attorney General, Letitia James, is actually gathering some information.
So he starts to complain that it's a political hit.
Well, of course it's a political hit.
You know, Letitia James is an attorney general.
She wants to be governor.
That's what attorney, you know, they call Attorney General AG.
That's what AG stands for.
A stands for a person who wants to be, and G stands for governor.
They all want to be governor.
So of course it's a political hit.
However, when she came out with the report, it was very, very well done.
It was a plotting, you know, information gathering report because clearly she had the goods.
Here's a cut of her telling what she saw as Cut 7.
Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.
The independence investigation found that Governor Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women, many of whom were young women, by engaging in unwanted groping, kisses, hugging, and by making inappropriate comments.
Further, the governor and his senior team took actions to retaliate against at least one former employee for coming forward with her story, her truth.
Governor Cuomo's administration fostered a toxic workplace that enabled harassment and created a hostile work environment where staffers did not feel comfortable coming forward with complaints about sexual harassment due to a climate of fear and given the power dynamics.
Now, I think obviously treating your employees like this is disgusting, but this is nothing compared to the thousands of old people he slaughtered by his incompetence, right?
While the press was going, oh, Governor Cuomo, he's so wonderful.
While they were doing that, he was wiping these people out.
That's nothing compared to this.
Okay, but this is the thing that gets the headlines.
Cuomo's response was wonderful.
He had a pre-recorded response because he knew it was coming down the pike.
And so it's cut with like illustrations of what he's talking about while he's talking about it.
Let's play just a clip of that, cut a I do it with everyone.
Black and white, young and old, straight and LGBTQ, powerful people, friends, strangers, people who I meet on the street.
I do kiss people on the forehead.
I do kiss people on the cheek.
I do kiss people on the hand.
I do embrace people.
I do hug people.
Men and women.
I do on occasion say chowbella.
On occasion, I do slip and say sweetheart or darling or honey.
What I love about this, aside from the illustration where he's talking slowly, if you're not watching, he's talking slowly so they can put up the pictures of him hugging different kinds of people.
What essentially he's saying is these women say they've been molested, but I'll tell them when they're molested.
They don't know when they've been molested.
That's essentially what he's saying.
He's not saying they're lying.
He's saying they don't know what they're saying.
Yeah, I put my hand on her breast, but that's just the kind of thing I do.
Yeah, I rubbed her backside for five, 15 seconds, but I'm just a kissy kind of guy.
I'll tell you.
I'm the governor.
I'll tell you when you've been molested.
Don't tell me when I'm molesting you.
I'm the governor.
I will tell you when you've been molested.
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You know, conservatives, rightly so, are very cynical about whether anything will happen.
This was a civil investigation.
There are no criminal indictments coming down.
There are local AGs who are looking at criminal cases and they are looking at Cuomo's COVID behavior and whether it led to deaths.
There is also a call for an impeachment.
They're speeding up the impeachment process.
Everybody's calling for him to resign.
But the Me Too movement has been so corrupted by politics that conservatives, of course, are wondering whether anything is going to come from this.
You know, they called on the governor of Virginia to resign.
Everybody said he should resign, resign, resign.
But then when they found out that there was corruption down the line so that the next person who would take the governor's office would be a Republican, and suddenly it was like, never mind, don't resign.
You know, the guy posed in blackface.
Megan Kelly, when she suggested that maybe being in blackface isn't always racist, which of course is true, she was fired.
She lost her job, but he actually posed in blackface or his excuse was, well, maybe I was the guy standing next to the guy in blackface dressed as the Ku Klux Klan.
That was his excuse.
I'm not the black guy, I'm the Klansman.
It's not so bad.
That's the governor of Virginia.
So we're cynical about this, but nothing has been more corrupted than this Me Too movement, which has a lot of legitimacy, especially in Hollywood, where women are treated like property.
It has legitimacy to it.
But we all, you know, George Stephanopoulos, he came up, his job with Bill Clinton was silencing women who had been, who claimed to have been molested and even raped, violently raped by Bill Clinton.
That was his job.
He intimidated the press.
There are movies out there.
There's a movie called The War Room.
You can see him intimidating the press into keeping quiet.
As a reward for that, he was put in charge of ABC News.
Why he got that job?
He has no journalistic experience that I know of, but he got the job at ABC News.
Then when Hillary Clinton was running, when Hillary Clinton was running, the Jeffrey Epstein story started to come up.
George Stephanopoulos attended a party in honor of Jeffrey Epstein, this guy who sold essentially underage women to, who slave-sold underage women to powerful men.
That's what he apparently did, allegedly.
He went to a party for Jeffrey Epstein.
Stephanopoulos went to a party for Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein had been convicted the first time of doing that, right?
So he went to a party honoring him.
Then Project Veritas came up with a video showing an ABC News newswoman, an anchor woman, saying, Amy Roebuck, saying she had the Epstein story as early as 2016.
She said, I had Clinton, I had everything, but Hillary Clinton was running for president, and that story was spiked according to this video of Hillary Roebuck.
She said they spiked the story.
No one, no one has ever asked George Stephanopoulos what he had to do with that.
He was in charge of the news department.
No one has ever asked him what he had to do with spiking that story.
Instead, what happened, that was at ABC, what happened is at CBS, they fired a woman who they thought had released the video to Project Veritas.
At NBC, meanwhile, they covered up Harvey Weinstein.
They forced Ronan Farrow to take that story to the New Yorker.
They covered that up at NBC while they were covering up Matt Lauer allegedly chasing women around, chasing every intern around, and apparently assaulting one intern so forcefully that she fainted and had to be taken down to the infirmary.
He was accused of sodomizing a co-worker while she wept and asked him not to.
He was accused of that too, and NBC was covering that up as well.
These are the people who then, NBC are the people who then released the Hollywood access tape where Donald Trump was saying ugly things about women.
And that's suddenly the feminists took to the streets in their pink hats.
Suddenly the feminists took to the streets in their pink hats.
When Joe Biden was accused by Tara Reed of she accused him of having thrown her up against the wall and jammed her hand, his hand up between her legs, when she was accused of that, nothing, nothing.
The New York Times let that story go for 19 days, then buried it on the inside of the Easter Sunday edition.
And when they asked Dean Buke about it, he said, well, you know, they asked Dean B.K. whether they covered Brett Kavanaugh, the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh differently.
And he said, well, you know, people hadn't heard about this story, so we didn't cover it.
They hadn't heard about it because they didn't cover it.
And now, finally, finally, Peter Ducey, who has been the only reporter in America for the last six months, finally, some other reporters are asking Jen Pesaki some hard questions, and they asked her about this.
Should there be an independent investigation of allegations into the president as there was into Governor Cuomo?
Well, first I would say the president has been clear and outspoken about the importance of women being respected and having their voices heard and being allowed to tell their stories and people treating them with respect.
Why Media Coverage Matters00:02:07
That has long been his policy, continues to be his policy.
That was heavily litigated during the campaign.
I understand you're eager to come back to it, but I don't have anything further other than to repeat that he has called for the governor to resign.
He has called for the governor to resign, but just remember, Governor Cuomo also tweeted that women had to be believed whenever they made accusations.
Here's his tweet.
There should be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to sexual harassment and must send a clear message that this behavior is not tolerated.
What's going to happen to Andrew Cuomo?
Well, obviously, I don't know what's going to happen, but I will tell you this.
He is in a very, very delicate position.
And the reason he's in a delicate position is everybody hates him.
He's a thug.
He's always been a thug.
He acts through threats.
He acts through intimidation.
He has a lot of power over where the money goes in New York.
The governor of New York has a lot of power over financial distribution, so everybody has had to kowtow to him.
And there is nobody to the right threatening to take his job.
So in other words, if he goes down, he's going to be replaced from the left because New York is virtually a one-party state.
That's the Republicans' fault, but it's virtually a one-party state.
So he is in a really delicate position because they will take him down because it's not going to hurt anybody.
But just think about, think about how badly this legitimate complaint that women have about the way they're treated in the workplace.
Think about how completely corruptly it has been handled by the media.
The thing is, on the right, we have to stop.
We have to stop being amazed.
We have to stop being gobsmacked and flabbergasted by how corrupt and how biased they are because it's not bias.
It is not bias.
It's corruption.
It is corruption.
The news media has been corrupted by the fact that it is taken over by these multinational corporations that have, one, a complete commitment to globalism.
Two, a complete commitment to the Chinese market.
And three, a commitment to the idea that the elite are important and special and should be protected and that you, the individual, the people for whom this country was formed, mean absolutely nothing.
The Role of Memory00:17:20
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So since this is my last show before my week-long vacation, I wanted to do one more cultural segment on identity.
I talked, I've done, this will be the third one.
The first week I talked about the gospel view of identity, that basically you are a word made flesh.
Jesus is the word made flesh, but you are the word of you.
You are the idea of you spoken into flesh.
And that you try, there's not a little ghost inside of you.
There's not a ghost in the machine, as they say.
You are an expression of a thought in God's mind.
And as an embodied creature, you have social roles to play as a male or a female.
Your race is part of it.
Your social traditions are all part of that.
But through all those, there's a means of expressing the essential self that God made you to be, the thought in God's mind.
So you're always moving, whether you are a black woman or a white man or whatever you are, you're always moving toward that thought in God's mind that you know, you know it's inside you.
You know you're not the person you're supposed to be, that you're trying to move toward the person that you're supposed to be.
And last week I talked about the particularly American problems that happen when you're released from class and social structures, and the emphasis is put on personal liberty.
On the plus side of that, freedom allows you to defy immoral traditions.
You can say, like Huck Finn, I don't care what the church and the law says, I'm going to stick with my friend, the escaped slave Jim, because I love him and the love is going to actually guide me in this.
But on the negative side of that, you can be open to fakery and self-delusion and thinking that even though you're a man, you can turn into a woman or people running cons on you and all that stuff.
And that's also in Huck Finn and a lot of other stories.
Today, I want to talk about the role of memory, the role of the mind, where the identity lives.
The memory is a very, very mysterious thing.
It's not that we don't know something about how it works, but it's still a philosophical mystery.
St. Augustine, or Augustine, as they say in England, wrote about this in his famous confessions, the confessions of St. Augustine.
He said, great is this force of memory, excessive great, oh my God, a large and boundless chamber.
Whoever sounded the bottom thereof, yet is this a power of mine and belongs unto my nature, nor do I myself comprehend all that I am.
Therefore, is the mind too straight, too narrow, to contain itself?
And where should that be which it containeth not of itself?
In other words, is everything I am existing in me and in my memory?
The mystery of memory is often explored in books and stories and movies about amnesia.
And if you think about it, there are got to be a million books and stories and movies about amnesia, and a lot of them are very good.
So I'm going to talk about a few of them very briefly, and I'm going to leave out one of your favorites.
And, you know, I know I am because there are just so many of them.
Stories about amnesia basically take three, there are basically three types.
The first type is the one, Who Am I?
A guy wakes up and he has literally forgotten who he is and he has no idea who he is.
And obviously, one of the great thrillers about this is The Born Identity, a terrific book by Robert Ludlam.
But it was made into what I think is one of the best action films ever made.
The Born Identity in 2002 with obviously with Matt Damon.
As Jason Bourne, he's found on a ship completely without his memory.
But the thing that is really interesting about it and kind of the genius of the story lies in the fact that while Bourne has lost his identity, he does not know who he is.
His body remembers who he is.
He still has all these skills.
You know, he gets attacked and suddenly he finds out, oh my gosh, I can fight like a master, you know, a master killer.
There's a scene where he goes into a diner with the girlfriend who's helping him escape, played by Franca Potenti, I think her name is pronounced, a German actress, really good German actress.
And he says to her, I don't know who I am, but I can do all this stuff.
Here's a clip from The Born Identity.
I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside.
I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs 215 pounds and knows how to handle himself.
I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab with a gray truck outside.
And at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
Now, why would I know that?
How can I know that not know who I am?
It's a wonderful scene.
I love this picture.
I actually graphed out this picture so I could learn more about my own trade and how to write a thriller.
It's a really terrifically put together picture.
And the theme of almost all who am I stories is that I am somebody, but I don't know who I am.
My memory doesn't define me.
The self is still mysteriously there.
In Bourne's case, it's in his muscle memory.
It's in all the things that he can do, but he can't put them in the context of an overall identity.
And it really brings together this kind of idea that we're something more than our body, but we also are our body.
And it also gives Born and anybody in this situation a chance to reshape his life, to reconsider his destiny and take the person that history has made him, but guide it in a different direction.
And it really has a sort of, you know, just by virtue of being an amnesia story, has a kind of important thing to say about our identities, that it is not just what we remember.
It is also who we are in our bodies in some mysterious way.
The second kind of amnesia story is, I remember who I am, but I've forgotten what happened last Tuesday.
That's the one recently, The Girl on the Train.
And it usually involves a murder or a death, and did I do it, right?
There's a wonderful film since everybody has either read the book, a really good book.
I thought the movie wasn't very good of the girl on the train, but the movie, the book, I mean, was excellent.
But there was a really good film back in the 60s called Mirage, and it is kind of underrated and forgotten.
It's a pseudo-Hitchcock film directed by a fairly famous director, Edward Demetric.
And it's starring Gregory Peck as a guy who knows who he is and then suddenly finds out that he can't remember a huge chunk of his past.
He knows who he is.
He knows what he does, but he can't figure out who he is.
And he goes to a shrink and he's trying to explain the situation.
What were you doing the day before you got the job?
I don't know.
The week before then?
I don't know.
The year before?
I can't remember.
I see.
Why didn't you come right out and say so in the first place?
Well, I don't think that I actually realized it until just now.
Are you trying to tell me you've been suffering from amnesia for two years and ever suspected that fact until this very minute?
It rather looks that way, doesn't it?
It rather looks this way, doesn't it?
Really good plot, really well done and interesting movie.
The stories of what happened last Tuesday almost always revolve around something terrible that has happened.
And is the person to blame?
Is the person who cannot remember that day to blame?
Did I do it?
And the question is not really who am I, but who am I really?
What am I capable of?
Am I a good guy or a bad guy?
Am I the thoughts?
I mean, we all have this problem in a lot of ways.
You know, that Dickens, David Copperfield, starts with whether I'm to be the hero of my own life.
Am I the hero of my own life?
Or, as in that video, that joking video of the guys who look like Nazis, and they start to say, are we the baddies?
Or am I a baddie?
You know, am I the good guy who goes to work, who's being nice to his family?
Or did I kill somebody?
Did I kill somebody?
And that's, you know, that is part of all of our lives because all of us have these thoughts, these ugly thoughts, these things that we want to do, those times when we're stuck in traffic and we think I'm going to kill that guy.
I hope he dies.
And we suddenly say, is that who I really am?
Or am I the guy who is living out my life in this orderly way?
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The third kind of amnesia story, and obviously all these genres can be mixed together, but these are the three basic kinds, is the implanted memory story.
That I am somebody, but I'm not who I think I am, right?
And this is a great story written by Philip K. Dick called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.
It was made twice into the film Total Recall.
Dick is interesting.
He's a bad writer, but he has these wonderful ideas.
Everything he writes has been made into a movie at this point because he had these wonderful science fiction ideas.
He's just not very, you know, I find his writing kind of dull.
And this movie stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it is a wonderfully, wonderfully written and plotted movie, even though Schwarzenegger is just so bad in it.
He is such a bad actor whenever he has to play a real person.
He plays a construction worker.
He goes to get a memory vacation where they're going to implant a fun memory in his head and it sort of drives him crazy.
And then he's attacked and somebody tries to kill him.
And he runs home to his wife, who's played by a young Sharon Stone, and he doesn't know what the hell is going on.
He's just a construction worker.
Why do these people try to kill him?
Here is the scene from Total Recall.
Some men just tried to kill me.
Muggers, are you all right?
No, they were spies or something.
And Harry from work, he was the boss.
Take it easy, Doug, okay?
Tell me exactly what happened.
Why would spies want to kill you?
I don't know, but it had something to do with Mars.
Mars?
I've never even been to Mars.
I know it sounds crazy.
But see, I went to this recall place after growth.
You went to those brain butchers?
Let me finish.
What did they do to you, tell me?
I got a trip to Mars and so what happened was forget about recall will you?
These guys were going to kill me.
Doug, nobody tried to kill you.
They did, but I killed them.
Listen to me, sweetheart.
Those ass at Recall have f ⁇ ed up your mind.
You're having paranoid delusions.
You call it this a delusion.
He holds up his hands and they're covered in blood.
And of course, the question of stories like this is, is your identity wholly a construct of forces outside yourself?
Whether it's society, you know, the left is always saying this is a social construct, and that's always for some reason a bad thing.
The Marxist idea is that you have false consciousness.
This is what this kind of amnesia story is about.
It's about whether or not how much of your consciousness is constructed outside yourself.
Obviously, the ultimate expression of that story is The Matrix, where the entire world that he's in is an illusion.
But there's another story that came out, it came out, I think, before The Matrix, or right around the same time, and was utterly overlooked called Dark City.
Dark City is a terrific little movie.
It hasn't got the money that The Matrix has, so it hasn't got the same kind of style, but it puts all three of these ideas together.
It starts out as an amnesia story.
It becomes a, what did I, did I kill this woman story?
And it finally becomes an implanted memory story.
It stars the very underrated actor Rufus Sewell.
He wakes up in a bathtub.
He doesn't know where he is, and he gets a call from Kiefer Sutherland.
Here's that scene.
It's the opening scene.
You are confused, aren't you?
Frightened.
That's all right.
I can help you.
Who is this?
I am a doctor.
Now, you must listen to me.
You have lost your memory.
There was an experiment.
Something went wrong.
Your memory was erased.
Do you understand me?
No, I don't understand.
What the hell is going on here?
Just listen.
There are people coming for you, even as we speak.
You must not let them fight you.
You must leave now.
That's as good an opening as you can get.
And he looks over while he's talking, he looks over and there's a dead woman lying in his bedroom, I believe.
The ultimate question of all these stories is how much of our identity is a physical construct?
How much of it is in our body?
And if it's not in our body, where is it?
And this is something that I think is confusing modern scientists and modern materialists who believe, many of whom believe, that we have no identity, that our identity is an illusion created by the narrative function in our minds.
And they've done all kinds of experiments where the two halves of the brain have been separated and something will happen to one half of the brain and the other half of the brain will not understand it and will have to create a false narrative about it.
And they believe that we have no identity.
It's just a false narrative that our mind is putting together, and that we have no free will.
It's just a series of impulses that goes along.
Yuval Harari is a believer in this, and he writes, when a neuron fires an electric charge, this may be either a deterministic reaction to external stimuli or perhaps the outcome of a random event such as the spontaneous decomposition of a radioactive atom.
Neither option leaves any room for free will.
If you don't believe in the spirit, if you don't believe in God, you ultimately must come to the conclusion that we have no free will, that everything is determined by one materialist cause after another.
But the funny thing is, the funny thing is, the idea that the body can break and in breaking, break the self, is not a new idea.
It's as old as time.
One of the other things that can happen to you is you can die.
Worse than that, you will die.
And when you die, whatever it is that you are now will be extinguished.
If you've ever been under anesthesia, they turn you off like a lamp.
You know, you just go out.
You don't know where you were for that hour that the surgery was taking place.
The fact that the body can break is not a surprise.
And if you believe, as so many of these materialists who don't read any theology believe, that people who believe in the soul believe there's this little Caspar the ghost inside you, and they can't find that Caspar the ghost, so they don't believe in it, then, of course, we have no free will.
We have no identity.
Our minds don't mean anything.
But instead of believing that, instead of believing that reality is an illusion, what we believe, what Christians believe, is that we refer to another plane of being, just like a number two doesn't exist anywhere.
It's just an idea in people's mind, but it refers to something real because we know that because we can measure things with numbers.
So we know that it refers to something real.
You refer to something real.
You refer to the idea of you in God's mind, and that is what you are trying to move toward with your body.
And that's why Christians believe that you don't go to heaven and play a harp, but you will be given a new body, a perfected body that will perfectly express what now is only expressed through a glass darkly.
You will be given a perfected body in a new heaven and a new earth that will show God's mind exactly instead of in the broken way we see it now.
Last Chance for The Morning Wire00:04:23
So I've got copy here before me that says one of the best things you can possibly do to improve your health is get at least seven hours of quality sleep every night.
I'm just going to take that as given because I have no idea.
I haven't had seven hours of quality sleep since I can't remember when.
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Magnesium is key to getting good sleep, but 75% of people are actually magnesium deficient.
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It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
There are no easing.
All right.
Bad news and good news.
The bad news is our president is playing dictator while circumventing U.S. law to extend the eviction moratorium and threaten citizens with vaccine mandates.
The good news is Ben Shapiro wrote a book about this creeping brand of authoritarianism, and it just made the New York Times bestseller list, which is a well-deserved and impressive feat.
The book is called The Authoritarian Moment, and unfortunately for all of us, it couldn't be more timely because authoritarianism has now come to America's shores, and if we don't do something about it, we will pay the price.
That's why there's no better time to pick up Ben's latest book and do your own deep dive into the history of authoritarianism, how it's creeping into our own government, and what you can do to stop it.
It's time to learn how to say no to a tyrannical government.
The Authoritarian Moment is now available at Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, or any other major bookseller.
So go get your copy now and leave a five-star review to help get Ben's book where it belongs at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
It is very, very appreciated.
We've had a lot to celebrate here at the Daily Wire, including the success of our newest podcast, The Morning Wire.
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As our president begins to turn his back on the citizens of the country he swore to protect, there is no better time to talk about the current state of the world politically, culturally, and philosophically over cigars and whiskey for all the world to see.
And because we're so appreciative of everyone who tunes in to see us, we've decided to get you in on the backstage action.
We're giving away a trip for two to come hang with the Daily Wire host backstage here at our Nashville studio, where you can meet us all, tour the studios and offices, get a great swag bag of merch, and watch us debate on the show live.
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Why We Left Afghanistan00:14:44
So one of the few things I agree with Joe Biden about is his decision to get out of Afghanistan.
And I wanted to bring somebody on who actually feels that that's the wrong thing to do.
And Cliff May is the founder and president of FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
It's a nonpartisan think tank, very much committed to defending democracies around the world and very much in favor, and Cliff is very much in favor of staying in Afghanistan.
Cliff, thank you for coming on.
It's good to see you.
Good to see you.
My pleasure to be with you.
So let's begin with this.
I mean, the war in Afghanistan has been going on so long that I think a lot of people have no idea why, how it even started.
Could you give us just a quick history lesson of what happened 20 years ago and why we're there?
Yeah, to some of us, it seems like only yesterday, but 20 years ago, Al-Qaeda launched the most lethal attack ever on American soil.
They brought down the two World Trade Towers in New York City, and they brought down the Pentagon.
They did that even though they don't have any of their own missiles.
They hijacked passenger jets.
They had terrorists who knew how to fly them, trained in the U.S.
This should have been a clue because some of those terrorists made clear during their training, I need to know how to take off.
They don't necessarily need to know how to land.
That might have given a clue to the FBI or somebody.
They used those jets.
I remember the morning very distinctly, a very clear morning in September, a beautiful morning.
One jet hit one of the World Trade Towers.
A lot of us thought, well, that must be a terrible, terrible accident.
But then a second jet hit the other World Trade Tower.
And we realized, no, this is an act of terrorism on American soil.
Another hijacked jet hit the Pentagon.
A personal note, I had a friend on the jet in the Pentagon.
I had a close friend in the World Trade Tower who died when it collapsed.
And then there was another jet, by the way, that was brought down by the passengers.
They realized what was going on.
They knew that jet was attended, it was going to hit either the Capitol building or the White House.
And they said, let's fight.
Let's go down fighting.
And they did in Pennsylvania.
So these guys.
These terrorists, though, they were from Saudi Arabia.
They were run by a Saudi.
They were no.
Yes and no.
I mean, most of them, not all of them, most of them were from Saudi Arabia.
Their base was not in Saudi Arabia.
They were very anti-Saudi.
And I can explain why.
They were based in Afghanistan.
They were being hosted, given refuge by the Taliban.
And we knew that.
We had some intelligence, not very good intelligence.
They had Osam bin Laden was the head of this group called Al-Qaeda, that means the base.
He had actually declared war on the United States.
I think it was 1998.
And most people said, ha ha ha, who is this guy in some cave in Afghanistan to declare war on the United States?
This is very funny, and we didn't pay serious attention.
They attacked two of our embassies in Africa later and killed a lot of Americans and a lot of Africans.
made more people pay attention, but we didn't do anything serious.
I think President Clinton lobbed a few missiles into a few tents, maybe hit a few camels in Afghanistan, that sort of thing, but nothing serious.
We didn't really understand that what they could do using hijacked jets.
And by the way, I tell you, Khandi Rice said, who could imagine such a thing?
Well, actually, I think this was a failure of imagination because terrorists in the past had used O-trucks.
and to attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 with a truck bomb.
Didn't bring it down, but killed some people.
Should have been a warning for us.
They used boats.
The attack on the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, a boat filled with explosives hits, 19 sailors are killed.
The idea that terrorists would use a vehicle, a hijack it, to attack us, that should have been taken seriously.
None of this was taken seriously.
We had a mentality before 9-11 that was detrimental and allowed them to succeed and do what they did on that date.
Okay, but then, so you have them staging, you know, hiding out in Afghanistan, essentially, because the Taliban, this horrible terrorist organization is virtually running the country.
What's the idea of going in?
What's the purpose of sending our troops into Afghanistan?
So at that point, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, this was an act of war.
President Bush, and I think with the country very solidly behind him, said we have to do something about that.
And he said to the Taliban, you need to turn over al-Qaeda to us.
You can't continue to harbor them.
And the Taliban said, go pound sand.
We're not turning anybody over to you.
These are our brothers in jihad, and we're just not doing it.
Do what you will.
At that point, he said, okay, we're going to send in, we're going to topple the Taliban.
And that's what he did.
Now, you can argue that after toppling the Taliban from power, he could have pulled out or he could have put a general.
There's all kinds of things one can argue and counterfactuals and what you did.
But basically, after that, we did what we wanted to do.
We did it pretty quickly, actually, with a very small number really of special forces.
We had some alliances with anti-Taliban forces in the north.
We can go into that or we cannot, but that was done.
And then we stayed on and there was not a very good, I don't think anybody disputes this.
There was not a very good plan for what we're going to do there and how we're going to do it and how we're going to make sure that Al-Qaeda gets wiped out.
We tried to kill bin Laden early on.
We took another 10 years before we found him.
Eventually, we found him in Pakistan, in Abbottabad, which is a city near the capital of Islamabad.
It's sort of like a West Point sort of place.
I doubt very much that there were not Pakistanis who knew he was there.
I can't prove that, obviously, but that's what I'd say.
Eventually we found him and killed him.
And then, of course, that was under President Obama, who said, well, now Al-Qaeda is not a problem for us anymore.
Not true.
Was not true.
Al-Qaeda morphed, al-Qaeda changed, and Al-Qaeda remained very much aligned with the Taliban as it is to this day.
There's now Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent.
There's Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
There's Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Qaeda has affiliations and branches all over the world.
But listen, we have achieved a few things in the time we've been in Afghanistan.
There are things we haven't achieved.
There's not been another attack on American soil.
You can say, oh, that could be just coincidence, and it could be.
I guess we're going to test that right very shortly.
In Kabul, things have transformed amazingly.
Used to have women getting an education was unheard of in that country.
Now there are as many women as men getting educations, going into government, doing all kinds of things.
You have a whole generation growing up in 20 years aligned with America and with American values and looking to America, not everywhere in the country.
Not least, the Taliban over this time hasn't won.
They've been relegated.
They've been consigned.
They've been kept in the boondocks.
They haven't managed to take one single major population center, not a provincial capital, certainly not Kabul.
They can't say, as they are going to be able to say very shortly, I fear, we defeated the United States.
You see, we can.
And by the way, it's an important thing just to remember.
Sheikh colleague Sheikh Mohamed, you know who he is.
Your listeners may not, but he was the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks.
We caught him.
We brought him to Guantanamo, to Guitmo.
And there in Guantanamo, he told his interrogator, we are going to win.
And we're going to win in a very simple mechanism.
You're going to get tired and you're going to quit and you'll leave and we'll win.
Okay, strategic.
But it is, but they always call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires.
I mean, empire after empire has gone into this country.
I was there very briefly, embedded with the troops.
And what I saw was a wilderness with medieval tribes spread out around the place.
American money dollars were being poured into projects.
And every project I saw was just a bunch of lumber, basically.
I mean, they weren't really spending our dollars.
They were obviously keeping them.
Whenever the Americans pushed back against the Taliban, which we both agree is one of the worst, truly one of the worst groups of fascist killers on the planet, the Taliban would just retreat into that empty fatal land between Afghanistan and Pakistan and then come back whenever the spring came.
So I guess what I want to know is what were we trying to do?
What was the idea?
What was the picture of what we were ultimately trying to do?
Well, look, I'm not going to disagree with you that we didn't have a coherent strategy.
Everybody would say that.
H.R. McMaster, who served there, he was a national security advisor to President Trump for a time.
He's affiliated with my organization, had a very good, I think, op-ed on this subject, along with Bradley Bowman, who heads our military center on exactly this.
You might want to make it available to your listeners.
He would say, look, instead of fighting a 20-year war, we fought a one-year war 20 times over, and we didn't have a coherent strategy.
And you can't, and he would say, yeah, nation building all over the place.
That is not going to work.
This is a wild country.
But he's going to say in Kabul that we have created something that's worth preserving if we can, at a reasonable cost, at a reasonable cost.
And that's very important because, yes, we spent a lot in the early years.
In 2011, when we were still thinking we were fighting a war to defeat the Taliban, we had about 100,000 troops there.
How many troops do we have in February in Afghanistan this year?
2,500.
You know how few troops 2,500 is?
How many did we have at the capital when Nancy Pelosi got scared after January 5th?
25,000.
We have more than 10,000 troops in Qatar, which is not a friendly, reliable ally.
But forward deployments are important.
So if you're going to say we made terrible mistakes in Afghanistan, I will not disagree with you.
H.R. McMaster will not disagree with you.
You're right.
But that doesn't mean we should make another mistake.
It's a little like the mistakes we made in Iraq.
But one of those mistakes, I think you'll agree, Drew, I think you'll agree, was in 2011 when President Obama said, against the advice of almost everybody in his national security cabinet, I'm not going to leave a small residual force, 10,000 was the number being banded about, here in Iraq.
We're going to get everybody out.
And he sent Joe Biden over to do it.
And Joe Biden called him up and said, thank you for letting me end this endless war.
I am so grateful to you, Mr. President.
This is wonderful.
And what happened?
Well, you know what happened.
The Islamic State rose from the ashes of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and it became a terrible terrorist group that killed a lot of people, did terrible damage, established a caliphate the size of like Great Britain.
I mean, just huge territory.
And what did even Obama have to do?
He had to send troops back into Iraq.
And here's an interesting thing, Andrew, really interesting.
How many troops do we have in Iraq right now?
2,500, about the same number as we have.
And what is the Biden policy, at least right now, in Iraq?
He says, well, we're not on a con, we're not, after the end of this year, we won't be on combat missions.
Our mission will be simply to train, assist, and advise to provide intelligence and close air support.
And Drew, that is exactly what General McMaster and what I and Bradley Bowman are suggesting for Afghanistan.
Train, assist, advise, provide intelligence, which only we can do.
We can talk about why, and close air support.
So the Afghan forces, which have long been doing the brunt of the fighting, can continue to do that and suppress the Taliban.
Keep in mind that we really stopped combat missions.
We really stopped fighting a war in Afghanistan in 2014 under President Obama.
He says it's the end of combat missions.
Why didn't he say more about that?
Very simply, because he was the one who said, if you remember when he was getting out of Iraq, the real war is in Afghanistan.
This is the war we have to win.
This is the important battlefield.
So he couldn't say, I'm giving up the battle, but it makes sense in the situation we're now in for us not to fight wars, but to support our allies who want to fight our common enemies.
Okay, so the idea is we leave 2,500 guys there.
Maybe we keep Bagram Air Force Base, which I guess we've already surrendered.
And that gives us, I mean, if we leave and we are leaving, the Taliban is going to go in and they're going to kill women again.
They're going to behead people.
They're going to cut off arms of anybody who is a thief.
We get that.
And if they stay, what do we get for that?
What do we get besides a piece of?
What we could get is a really important platform in the Indo-Pacific.
Why is the Indo-Pacific important?
Well, that's where Al-Qaeda is.
Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan.
And according to reports I can show you that are credible, it's more aligned with the Taliban than ever before.
They've been literally intermarrying over this past 20 years.
But it's not just against Al-Qaeda.
There are more than a dozen other terrorist organizations in that region, in the Indo-Pacific, that we need to be concerned about.
Most people haven't heard of them.
But again, in 2001, most people hadn't heard about Al-Qaeda or even the Taliban.
So we want to monitor them and we want to hit them when necessary.
And also, there's another country about which we need to be concerned in the Indo-Pacific.
Maybe people have heard about it.
It's called the People's Republic of China.
And having a base in Afghanistan, in this area, in the Pacific, is very useful militarily.
And there aren't a lot of other places in the area.
In fact, there are none that are as good.
Pakistan is one of our most, one of our most unreliable allies.
You don't want to put it there.
Very hard to put it in Central Asia because Turkestan, Uzbekistan, they worry about the Chinese.
They worry about the Russians.
They don't want to get on their bad side, especially for the Americans who might just abandon them if the going gets tough.
That's going to be a problem too.
We could also, you know, if we abandon people who have allied with us and been with us and are pro-American, it's going to be hard to get allies in the future.
Why Abandoning Allies Hurts Us00:04:24
So people who want to, I want to tell you one look, can I tell you one quick story?
President Ghani, he's the president of Afghanistan, and Abdul Abdullah, his sort of his rival.
So they came to Washington, and you remember President Ghani had a meeting with President Biden where he was going to make his case.
The night before, I went to a dinner with President Ghani.
I wasn't there.
It wasn't a tiny intimate dinner.
They're about 20 or maybe 50 people around a big table in a big hotel there.
And people were telling him what to ask.
And they said, you know, ask for close air support, ask for intelligence, ask for, and I wasn't really planning to speak to a lot of generals, a lot of ambassadors, a lot of people.
I thought I would just, I was pleased to be invited.
I just listened, but I kind of couldn't help myself.
So I finally said, look, President Ghani, here's what I think you should be telling President Biden.
You should say that we, the Afghan government, the Afghan forces, the Afghan people, we are going to fight the Taliban.
We're going to fight Al-Qaeda.
The Taliban and Al-Qaeda are our enemies, and they're your enemies.
We're going to fight them, but we could fight them more effectively if we have some support for you.
We're not saying that you should be out there on the front lines.
We're saying help us when we're out there in the front lines because the kind of intelligence we want, you can't get from a satellite.
The kind of intelligence we want is a village, at least with this one phrase, this is a village elder who is sick of the Taliban eating his food, marrying his daughters, and recruiting his kids to the town.
The thing I want to ask is: what conflict could ever end?
What conflict that we go into could ever end following this logic?
Because I see what you're saying, and I think you're making an excellent case, Cliff.
I really do.
Talking to Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, but I want to know: like, are we supposed to be everywhere?
I mean, there are atrocities everywhere.
So, your entire, I entirely agree with you on this.
Okay.
And that makes, and there's two points that we should draw from this.
One is we should be very careful where we intervene because we may end up staying there a long time.
We intervened in Europe.
It was called World War II.
We're still in Germany.
We're still in Italy.
We're still in quite a few countries in Europe to this day.
But we maintain stability and we kept the Nazis from back.
We're still in Japan.
We're still in Guam.
We're still in South Korea, a long time after the war there.
So when we intervene, we may get stuck for a long time.
There's absolutely right.
So we should be very careful.
In this case, you have a lot of young listeners who won't remember this, but I do, and you probably too, vaguely in your early youth.
You were just a teenager, I'm sure.
That after the attacks of 9-11, killing people jumping out of the World Trade Towers because it was better to die that way than to burn, after the attack on the Pentagon, going right into the wall and killing people at their desks, most Americans, the vast majority, there were some said, yes, we have to do something about it.
And this was what we did.
And yes, that makes a commitment.
But there's one other thing.
We're not there only for humanitarian reasons, although I don't totally poo-poo humanitarian reasons.
We are there for, we should be there only for strategic reasons.
So you should ask, others should ask, military people like H.R. McMaster, general, given the threats we face, given the challenges we have, given the enemies we have, is it useful for us to have a base like Bagram?
Is it useful for us to have a forward deployment there?
Or can you do the same thing from Fort Bragg and Fort Benning and Fort Hood?
Is it just the same?
And I'm going to tell you, most three out of four dentists surveyed recommend three out of four military say, no, no, we want to be close to our enemies so that we can give them proper attention.
We cannot do from Texas and North and Georgia what we can do from there.
And if this base is useful to us and the government will give it to us, we should have it.
Now, if it's not useful to us, maybe we say too bad for the women, too bad for our friends.
I think there's some problems with that, not from humanitarian, but because we want allies in the future.
I've only got a minute left, but I have to ask you this.
The historian Niall Ferguson says that the big problem with America is that it's an empire, but it will not act like an empire.
Do you agree with that?
Yes and no.
We're an empire that is unlike any other empire in the world history.
And Neil would tell you that as well.
Disagreeing with Me Slows Intellectual Growth00:10:41
And why would he tell you that?
Because we're the only empire I know of that doesn't take land, that doesn't say we're planting the flag.
We left nothing in Europe but graves.
We did not take over South Korea.
We did not take over Iraq and our allies there knew that.
One of the reasons we had allies in Iraq for the surge.
I don't know, we can't talk, maybe people know what the surge was, but it prevented a terrible defeat there, is because we were the strongest tribe and we were not a tribe that was going to marry their daughters and take over their land.
We are not in Afghanistan as empire builders.
We are there to help those who want to be helped and we're there to better protect Americans from our enemies, of which we have too many.
I've got to stop you there.
Clifford May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, you make a very good case.
Well done.
I'm glad to talk to you.
Thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
Appreciate it, Drew.
All right.
Last show before my vacation.
So you want to gather all your problems around you.
Don't leave any in the other room.
Get your problems together.
Tell them you've loved having them with you, but now they're going to all be solved because it's time for the mailbag.
Oh my God, I'm white.
That happens to me every morning.
I hate it.
It's just every morning.
Oh, I look in the mirror.
All right, from Ben.
I'm having a really hard time with something Jesus says in the Bible and would greatly appreciate your thoughts.
Here are Jesus' words in Matthew 5.
You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
The letter writer then goes on to say, no sex before marriage is understandable, but now I can't even think about it.
What am I supposed to do?
Just stop looking at beautiful women.
I want to get married someday.
I'm 19, but I don't want my bride's body to be a surprise on the wedding day.
Please help me make sense of this verse.
A lot of people stumble on this verse, and there are a lot of different interpretations of it.
I'm going to give you mine.
And I'm not a theologian, but this is the way I read it, and it's the way I've always understood it, because it is a difficult thing.
You know that, you know, you only have to ask your spouse, if you have a spouse, whether it's the same for you to lust after someone in your heart or actually commit adultery.
And of course, it's not.
And Jesus cannot be saying that you are bearing the same moral guilt for lusting after a woman in your heart as you are for committing adultery.
What he's telling you, what he is telling you that obeying the law does not change your nature.
Obeying the moral law, doing the moral thing does not change your nature.
He is telling you that you are broken, that the system inside you is not who you are, that there is something more that you are and more that you can be that you should be moving toward.
Now, a lot of Christians, and I seriously disagree with this, a lot of Christians feel that that means you should be forcing yourself never to feel any lust or never to think about women or never to desire women, never to desire a woman who's not your wife and all this stuff.
And it's just to me, it's such a miserable life that I can't reconcile it with Jesus telling me that he wants me to live in joy.
That's a miserable life to not look at the beautiful women, to not desire women, to not express, to not feel your desire.
And no, I do not believe that Jesus is saying it is the same.
It bears the same moral weight as adultery.
What he is telling you is that obeying the law does not change your nature and you have to understand that nature.
He wants you to move into a nature where perhaps you might feel that there is a difference between desire and lust, a difference between admiring and feeling the erotic charge of the opposite sex and looking at pornography, say, of entertaining that kind of inhuman version of sex that lust can lead you to.
He is telling you that you are something other than your body, even though you are expressed by your body.
That's what I have always believed it meant.
And I do not believe that it means that you should wrap yourself.
I think that too much of ordinary Christian preaching on sex ends with you kind of miserably battling who you are, especially if you're a young person, when essentially your job is to pair off with someone and create new life.
That's essentially what this part of your life is about.
So no, that's not what I think it means.
It does mean a deeper understanding of the completeness of the brokenness of humanity, a completeness of the idea that don't think because, don't think because you are not committing a sin, that you are free of sin.
That would be a ridiculous idea of yourself.
You want a realistic idea of yourself because that helps you to start to move into a realistic kind of change.
And that realistic kind of change is not going to be by restricting yourself.
It's going to be stepping into spaces that God makes for you as you go along.
I'll talk about that at greater length another day.
From Bob.
Hello, Andrew.
I love your show.
I'm one of the numerous Came for Shapiro State for Clavin fans.
I hope this email doesn't make me sound like a jerk, but if it does, so be it.
Did you notice the contradiction in your argument contained in episode 1042?
They demonize us for their failures.
You ended the episode answering a letter from someone concerned about white males using the N-word and lamenting the continued use of the word.
But this came after your glowing endorsement of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book noted for its liberal use of the word.
And in the book, the word's use isn't simply limited to bad guys or KKK members.
Huck, the hero of the story himself, uses the word throughout the book.
How do you reconcile your dislike for the word for it being included in perhaps the greatest work of American fiction?
This is not, I'm sorry to say, and it doesn't make you sound like a jerk.
It's a perfectly reasonable question.
But it is not, in fact, a contradiction.
It is the difference between art and life.
It is the difference between the way art works and what it does and life.
And this is one of the things I've always have to explain to conservatives, especially, that conservative art does not look like conservative life.
A conservative life is a life hopefully well-lived, a life where we understand who we are, our limitations, the limitations of human nature.
We can act heroically, we can act largely, but we try to act morally within certain constraints.
Whereas conservative art can look like Macbeth, the guy just killing his way to the throne because it reveals human nature.
And in order to reveal human nature, you sometimes have to say unpleasant things.
People are always, especially Christians, are always scoring me for including people in my books who curse and including foul language in my books, but that is because I'm trying to express reality, and sometimes reality is unpleasant.
I do not do it just for the fun of it.
I don't do it just to sound glib or to make, or just get a charge out of people.
But with my novel, Another Kingdom, for instance, I wrote the first version and left out all the curse words.
And at the end of it, I thought this sounds stupid.
This is not conveying the experience of life that I'm trying to convey.
And so the fact that Twain uses this word, he's also writing in a different time when it didn't have quite the weight that it has now.
It didn't have the weight that it has now.
But he was writing at a time and trying to convey that time to people.
And so he used that word.
There's nothing wrong.
There is nothing wrong with a work of art using that word.
You know, I don't think you should have to have a trigger warning.
I think we should understand what art does, is that it conveys the inner experience of man.
In order to do that, you have to tell the truth.
And in doing that, in telling the truth, sometimes you say and show unpleasant things.
The truth is always beautiful because the truth is beauty and beauty is truth, but the truth is not always pleasant.
And just as a general note, I just want to say that disagreeing with me normally will just slow down your intellectual development because you have to spend all that time figuring out why you're wrong.
So if you just agree with me, you get further ahead faster.
All right, one more quick one from Anonymous.
This is a long one.
It says, my father, whom I've always idolized and deeply respected, has abandoned my brother and me.
I realize it shouldn't matter given that I'm a 32-year-old young wife to my best friend and beyond measure blessed mother with three brilliant children, but it hurts me deeply.
My mother was mentally ill growing up.
Her disorder made her vicious, at times cruel to us and depressed.
By contrast, my dad was fun, musical, intelligent, artistic, and well-read.
They split a number of years ago, and I thought my dad would spend more time with my family, but instead he found another woman just like my mother and doesn't visit and goes away.
And she says, I don't know how to reconcile the pain, frustration, and sadness and anger.
I feel any advice or compassion from you would be genuinely appreciated.
Listen, it's very painful what you're experiencing, and I'm really sorry you're going through it.
It's a very painful thing.
You should know that there's never, almost never, just one crazy person in a marriage.
Almost always, when you think one person is crazy, the other person is just crazy in a quieter way, in a more difficult-to-see way.
So the fact that your father left your mentally ill mother and then married somebody who was mentally ill is not a surprise at all.
He was always part of the system.
The abuse that you were getting from your mother was in some sense also coming from him.
So it's a very painful situation, but I would say this.
I don't like to recommend therapy because I know that it kind of comes across as an easy solution.
But your good marriage, the fact that you're in a good marriage with children that you love shows that you have a certain inner strength and inner fortitude and inner completeness that actually is capable of getting past this pain that you're in.
The pain is legitimate.
You feel abandoned by both your parents.
That's a really painful thing.
I know about this.
I've been through a lot of this.
It's an extraordinarily painful thing.
A good therapist, even a mediocre therapist, can help you with this.
Even, you know, it's not going to take one of the greatest therapists for you to talk your way through this.
This is what therapists are for.
And I think it's a good thing to do.
And meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to accumulate some older friends who can maybe stand in in the parental role in your life and in your children's role.
Nothing is ever going to make up for losing your parents.
I can tell you that from experience.
But you can live perfectly happy without these aches and pains that you're feeling now.
And you should take care of it because you shouldn't be suffering for something that's not your fault.
And there's nothing you can do about it.
This was there in your life.
You probably don't know how much it was there in your life before because you were blaming it all on your mom and not seeing how your dad was part of it.
But he was part of it too.
It is a family system and you should talk to somebody and so that you can understand it better and you'll be able to take care of your feelings a lot better.
I'm done.
Not only a Clavenless Week, but two Clavenless Weeks lie ahead of you.
You're doomed.
It's over.
It's over.
Forget about it.
Two Weeks of Clavenless00:01:32
However, if you crawl through the darkness, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth to get to two weeks from now, Friday, two weeks from now, I will be back with the Andrew Clavin Show.
I will talk to you then, and I will still be Andrew Klavan.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, basically wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also, remember to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Matt Walsh Show, and the Michael Knoll Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Andrew Clavin Show is produced by Mathis Glover, executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens.
Production manager, Pavel Vidowski.
Edited by Danny D'Amico.
Lead audio mixer, Mike Cormina.
Animations are by Cynthia Angulo.
Production coordinator, McKenna Waters.
And our production assistant is Jacob Falash.
The Andrew Clavin Show is a Daily Wire production, Copyright Daily Wire, 2021.
John Bickley here.
Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
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